The Jacket (Star-Rover) eBook

And now my argument becomes plain. The spirit
is the reality that endures. I am spirit, and
I endure. I, Darrell Standing, the tenant of
many fleshly tenements, shall write a few more lines
of these memoirs and then pass on my way. The
form of me that is my body will fall apart when it
has been sufficiently hanged by the neck, and of it
naught will remain in all the world of matter.
In the world of spirit the memory of it will remain.
Matter has no memory, because its forms are evanescent,
and what is engraved on its forms perishes with the
forms.

One word more ere I return to my narrative.
In all my journeys through the dark into other lives
that have been mine I have never been able to guide
any journey to a particular destination. Thus
many new experiences of old lives were mine before
ever I chanced to return to the boy Jesse at Nephi.
Possibly, all told, I have lived over Jesse’s
experiences a score of times, sometimes taking up
his career when he was quite small in the Arkansas
settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on
past the point where I left him at Nephi. It
were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and
so, without prejudice to the verity of my account,
I shall skip much that is vague and tortuous and repetitional,
and give the facts as I have assembled them out of
the various times, in whole and part, as I relived
them.

CHAPTER XIII

Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir.
The cattle were driven out to water and pasture.
While the men unchained the wheels and drew the wagons
apart and clear for yoking in, the women cooked forty
breakfasts over forty fires. The children, in
the chill of dawn, clustered about the fires, sharing
places, here and there, with the last relief of the
night-watch waiting sleepily for coffee.

It requires time to get a large train such as ours
under way, for its speed is the speed of the slowest.
So the sun was an hour high and the day was already
uncomfortably hot when we rolled out of Nephi and on
into the sandy barrens. No inhabitant of the
place saw us off. All chose to remain indoors,
thus making our departure as ominous as they had made
our arrival the night before.

Again it was long hours of parching heat and biting
dust, sage-brush and sand, and a land accursed.
No dwellings of men, neither cattle nor fences, nor
any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that day;
and at night we made our wagon-circle beside an empty
stream, in the damp sand of which we dug many holes
that filled slowly with water seepage.

Our subsequent journey is always a broken experience
to me. We made camp so many times, always with
the wagons drawn in circle, that to my child mind
a weary long time passed after Nephi. But always,
strong upon all of us, was that sense of drifting
to an impending and certain doom.

We averaged about fifteen miles a day. I know,
for my father had said it was sixty miles to Fillmore,
the next Mormon settlement, and we made three camps
on the way. This meant four days of travel.
From Nephi to the last camp of which I have any memory
we must have taken two weeks or a little less.